[Rough copy] 

[London,] 5 February [1850] 
20 Queen’s Road 

I am only new answering your letter of 30 January because I am 
not inclined to let you prescribe ‘time limits’ for what I do. 

In reply to your letter the following: 

1. When Schramm wrote that my debt to you was not yet ‘due’, 
it only meant that one cannot be sued for a surgeon’s bills until six 
months have elapsed, certainly not that the debt does not exist. 

2. Far from having conceded to Mr Heidemann that your bill 
was not ‘too steep’, I told him the contrary, as he himself admitted 

a Julius Schuberth - > Louise 

on 22 January in the letter to my wife. Nevertheless I informed him 
that I was willing to pay. As I told him, I hoped that by January I 
should be in possession of the necessary amount although I could 
not guarantee this. The impertinence of Mr Heidemann in 
sending a woman a demand for payment under a black seal, which 
she mistook for the announcement of a death, moved me to have 
him informed in writing that I wished to have no further contact 
with him. 

3. As to your bill, I now insist that you itemize it. I fail to 
understand how you could have disbursed £1 on my behalf. You 
travelled out to me in Chelsea at my express request on only 
three occasions, once by cab. As to the confinement,* accoucheurs 
over here (except in the case of the bourgeois) charge for 9 
days—while you attended my wife on only 4 days out of the 
9, as Willich can testify—one guinea. Where, then, do you get 
£4.10 from? By the way, I am told that, immediately upon receipt 
of my letter,” you held a confabulation with Heidemann and 
decided ‘to fleece’ me. So first of all an itemized bill, which I shall 
then pay. 

K. Marx